How M-Pesa’s Ziidi Trader Is Quietly Changing Who Gets to Own a Piece of the Market

If you’ve spent any time following Kenya’s investment scene, you’ll know that buying shares on the Nairobi Securities Exchange has traditionally meant navigating stockbrokers, paperwork, and a fair amount of intimidation for anyone without a finance background. That barrier is starting to crack, and the numbers coming out of Safaricom’s Ziidi Trader platform tell an interesting story about it.

According to recent stats, the average amount individual investors are spending per share purchase on Ziidi Trader has climbed to roughly Sh4,818, nearly double the Sh2,872 average recorded when the app launched in March. That’s a meaningful jump in just five months, and it suggests something beyond casual curiosity: people are putting real money behind their first steps into the stock market.

Ziidi Trader is a joint venture between Safaricom, the NSE, and Kestrel Capital, built to let ordinary M-Pesa users buy and sell listed shares and corporate bonds straight from their phones. There’s no need to open a separate brokerage account, the platform simply piggybacks on the KYC details and PIN authentication M-Pesa users already have. Shares bought through the app sit in a single omnibus account that Kestrel Capital manages and trades on users’ behalf, which is what makes the whole process so frictionless.

The scale is genuinely striking. Close to a million individual investors have signed up since launch, though the number of people actively trading has stayed under 150,000, a gap industry figures attribute more to a lack of investment education than any real barrier to market access. As one capital markets figure put it, plenty of people want to invest but simply don’t know where to start, and giving them an easy entry point matters more than expecting everyone to become a stock-picker overnight. That’s part of the thinking behind pushing exchange-traded funds, which let new investors buy into a diversified basket instead of having to research individual companies.

Ziidi has already handled the majority of NSE share orders since it went live, averaging around 54 percent of the exchange’s order volume, even though the actual value of shares traded through the app remains modest at roughly two percent of total turnover. In other words, lots of small, frequent trades rather than large sums, which fits the profile of first-time retail investors testing the waters.

Interestingly, the data also shows individual investors have been net buyers rather than sellers, placing far more buy orders than sell orders. That’s a signal that people are accumulating and holding shares rather than flipping them, which is generally a healthier pattern for long-term capital formation.

The platform’s biggest moment so far was its role in the Kenya Pipeline Company IPO, where a large share of the roughly seventy-three thousand participants placed their orders through Ziidi. Safaricom has pointed to that IPO as proof the app is helping deepen financial inclusion by bringing everyday mobile money users into capital markets, they’d otherwise never touch.

Whether this translates into a genuinely more participatory stock market or just a modest bump in retail activity remains to be seen, but the direction of travel is clear: mobile money is doing for share trading in Kenya what it already did for payments and savings, making it radically more accessible.

Read Also: Safaricom’s Ziidi Trader Crowned Fintech of the Year 2026 at African Banker Awards